AI chatbots have grown rapidly in use over the past few years. While the global market is currently valued at just over $15 billion, some experts expect it to triple by 2029—up to $46 billion, at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 25%.
Put differently, AI chatbots are now the most commonly used artificial intelligence tool across the web. One survey found that 69% of businesses are actively integrating them into their tech stack, which helps to explain why 88% of online users can actively remember an interaction they had with a chatbot over the past year.
Of course, answering “Should we add a chatbot to our website?” must not be based on popularity alone. The fact that other businesses have done so doesn’t automatically mean the effort is worth your investment. Fortunately, the benefits of AI chatbots tend to go far beyond mere popularity. As you make your decision, consider these five advantages your business could leverage as a result.
1. AI Chatbots Provide Improved Customer Experience
First, and perhaps most importantly, adding an AI chatbot to your website enhances how your customers interact with your business online. In fact, the popularity of this tool has made it an increasing expectation for online users; when they visit your site, they expect an option to ask and get answers to questions instantly.
These needs can span across the entire sales cycle, from exploratory questions to functional queries about shipping fees or tracking information. When they arise, your future and current customers don’t want to wait for an email response or for you to pick up the phone. They need answers in the moment, which only AI chatbots can provide.
Beyond basic needs for information, chatbots can also serve to personalize the experience for all your customers. According to Zendesk, 70% of customer experience leaders believe that chatbots are “becoming skilled architects of highly personalized customer journeys.” Meanwhile, 69% of organizations believe in the power of AI tools like chatbots to humanize digital interactions and make online experiences more relevant to each user.
In addition, an effectively deployed AI chatbot can significantly reduce the potential for human error in the customer journey. By gathering answers from a database that can serve as a single point of truth, businesses can ensure that answers will remain accurate and consistent, no matter how many times they’re asked.
Finally, chatbots enhance the customer experience by freeing up human support staff for more custom and complex needs. The chatbot will answer routine and repetitive questions that can easily make up 90% or more of all customer service requests. Human teams, meanwhile, can focus only on questions that the chatbot has to pass off, ensuring a successful resolution in these more complicated matters.
2. Get Constant (and Consistent) Availability for Your Customers
Part of the enhanced customer experience that AI chatbots provide is simply their lack of downtime. Human staff, especially for small businesses, cannot cover customer service hotlines or live chat options for 24 hours, 7 days a week. Chatbots, on the other hand, easily can.
In fact, their capacity doesn’t tend to be limited by volume. A request coming in at 6 pm on a Friday is as easily answered as one that comes in at 2 am on a Tuesday. A high volume of requests during those weekend evening hours can be handled just as easily as off-hours, rather than having to queue up questions until sales or customer service staff becomes available.
And of course, that availability remains consistent, as well. Every question receives not just an instant answer, but a consistent answer that uses the same voice, tone, and functional information every time. Given that 66% of customers now expect answers to their online questions within minutes, this availability and consistency can become a core competitive advantage for users looking for quick and accurate answers.
As a hidden bonus of this availability, AI chatbots can even play a role in reducing employee turnover. Less staff having to work after hours or non-typical shifts means more regular working hours and a higher level of employee satisfaction, keeping your sales and customer support team engaged and with your organization for longer.
3. Expand Your Reach to Potential Customers
That 24/7 availability comes with more benefits than just making things more convenient for your current and future customers. It provides the AI chatbot with the ability to reach beyond your time zone and expand your customer base.
Even if you expect most of your inquiries to come during business hours, those business hours change for users in different time zones. Within the United States alone, that difference can be up to three hours. Go international, and the difference in time zone can go to 20 hours and beyond.
Traditionally, businesses have been limited by that simple truth, unable to expand beyond their core time zone due to a simple lack of support staffing. But if your organization has a product or service that easily translates to other geographical areas, AI chatbots can serve to expand or even eliminate that limitation.
As a result, you can significantly expand the geographical reach of your business. Potential customers who reach out to you receive answers instantly, no matter where (or when) they are in the world. Naturally, this expanded reach can unlock potentially significant customer and revenue growth.
4. AI Chatbots Effectively Collect and Analyze Data
Your chatbot can become more than just an interaction engine with online users. It also collects every bit of information about the conversations it has with these users, which can lead to invaluable business intelligence designed to help you make better decisions about your sales, marketing, and customer success efforts.
Some of the many examples of the analytics your AI chatbot can collect and analyze include:
- The volume of requests, allowing you to staff and manage your human teams more efficiently.
- The questions your users ask most frequently, enabling you to build content around these topics to answer them more proactively.
- Goal completion rate, allowing you to track exactly how often a chatbot conversation has allowed the user to have their question answered.
- Response accuracy, helping you track the quality of your database and make improvements where necessary at a moment’s notice.
- Human takeover rate, a measure of how often a question needs to be escalated to your team for a more custom interaction.
All of this data collection, and much of the analysis, happens dynamically and in real-time in the background of the AI chatbot application. As a result, you can easily gain intelligence about your customer behaviors and needs with actionable reports designed to prompt improvements.
5. Enhance Lead Generation and Nurturing
Finally, chatbots play a significant role in your lead generation and nurturing efforts. For every interaction with an online user, they capture contact information that can flow directly into your lead database or CRM system. In fact, according to one survey, more than 50% of companies using AI chatbots report an improvement in locating high-quality leads through the tool.
The reason behind the value of chatbots in generating leads is simple. When a potential customer has a question related to their purchase, they’ll be willing to provide their contact information—after all, they’d do the same when sending an email or making a phone call. Doing so also provides the ability for follow-ups should the initial chatbot conversation not provide all the necessary answers.
However, the benefit of AI chatbots goes beyond lead generation and into the nurturing and qualification process, as well. After all, users don’t stop asking questions just because they’ve entered your database. As outlined by G2, one-third of leads continue sharing their questions and concerns with chatbots during the qualification phase.
Each time they do, the chatbot gains additional information about the user and their needs that can feed into your database and continue to qualify the lead. By the time they’re ready for the sale, you might benefit from a comprehensive profile of the potential customer that can help to make the pitch and conversation more personally relevant to them.
Leverage the Power of Adding an AI Chatbot to Your Website
Ultimately, the benefits of adding a chatbot to your website can range widely. But all of these advantages help to support a single and crucial goal: to increase revenue for your business.
Through an enhanced customer experience, you improve sales conversions and customer loyalty. Constant availability and support beyond your geographic area increases revenue potential for newly unlocked markets. Through advanced analytics, you can make better business decisions. As a result, you generate and qualify more leads and boost your customer and revenue generation in the short term and long term.
The key is implementing an AI-enabled chatbot that maximizes the potential for all of these benefits. Once you find the right solution, a thorough implementation process can go a long way toward achieving success. The right tool implemented the right way, will allow you to fully leverage the power of adding an AI chatbot to your tech stack and enhancing your customer interactions.
